We were told that, after 1989, the age of territorial conquest had ended. We were assured that globalisation, multilateral institutions, and market integration had replaced old-style imperialism with something cleaner, more abstract, and infinitely more polite.
Wars would now be fought over norms, not resources; influence would be exercised through finance, not force; sovereignty would erode quietly under the pressure of capital rather than being seized at gunpoint. Although this narrative was always more comforting than accurate, it has now become actively misleading. What we are witnessing, instead, is not a new disorder but a familiar one.
When representatives of the Trump Administration claim that this was simply a law enforcement operation, they are diverting attention from what should be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of global history: they authorised the attack on Venezuela as part of a competition for raw materials, transit routes, and zones of extraction.
In this context, Maduro’s capture reads less like an isolated absurdity than a symptom of systemic regression. It belongs to a worldview in which legality is secondary to possession and sovereignty is treated as a temporary inconvenience rather than a binding constraint.
This is the geopolitics of concession maps and gunboat diplomacy, updated for an era in which press releases substitute for fleets and indictments for ultimatums.
The timing, of course, still matters. The arrest arrives amid a familiar swirl of domestic distractions: the unresolved metastasis of the Epstein files; the annual reemergence of 6 January as a font of unresolved political trauma; and an American economy that exists in a strange superposition, officially robust yet experientially precarious.
These distractions now operate within a broader structural shift. The spectacle does not merely deflect attention from domestic crisis; it reorients it outward, toward a world once more imagined as a storehouse of assets waiting to be seized.
Framed in this manner, Venezuela’s significance is not moral or ideological, but geological. Beneath the rhetoric about promoting democracy and criminal accountability lies a simple fact. Venezuela possesses one of the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, much of it in the form of the difficult, heavy crude that requires the sort of capital-intensive infrastructure American energy firms already command.
These oil reserves alone would make the country strategically relevant. But relevance is now being intensified by a second, more urgent pressure, one that rarely appears explicitly in official discourse.
The development of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power has introduced a terminal logic into carbon-based capitalism. Even in its current form, severely compromised by resistance from transnational corporations and the governments that serve them, the global transition to renewable energy threatens to leave vast reserves of fossil capital stranded.
Oil that remains underground after demand collapses won’t simply go unused. Rather, it will lose value, being transformed from an asset to a liability. For the owners of carbon-based energy resources—and for the states whose fiscal stability depends upon them—this creates a powerful incentive to extract as much value as possible before a tipping point is reached.
The horizon of transition, whether imminent or deferred, produces not restraint but acceleration.
In this sense, the current scramble for resources resembles the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not by accident but out of structural necessity. Then, as now, dominant powers confronted the prospect of relative decline. Then, as now, technological shifts threatened established forms of accumulation.
Back then, nations responded to this threat, not with graceful adaptation, but with intensified extraction, territorial expansion, and legal improvisation. In other words, imperialism was an attempt to outrun obsolescence.
The arrest of Maduro thus belongs to a world in which law functions less as a universal framework than as a flexible instrument of capture. Under what conceivable legal regime could Maduro actually be tried? The question answers itself by dissolving. Universal jurisdiction, invoked selectively, is less a doctrine than a gesture—one that loses coherence the moment it threatens the powerful.
Sovereign immunity, long treated as sacrosanct when it protects Western leaders, becomes optional when it impedes access to resources. The International Criminal Court hovers in the background as a kind of moral décor, useful for legitimising interventions elsewhere but conspicuously irrelevant when its jurisdiction might cut both ways.
What remains is not legality but plausibility, not justice but leverage. The Trump Administration does not intend for Maduro’s arrest to culminate in a courtroom. Its purpose is to circulate as a signal: Venezuelan sovereignty is provisional, its leadership is contestable, and its resources are already spoken for.
And so, by implication, is the sovereignty of any other nation that might seek to impede the extraction of wealth by a superpower. This is not the language of international law; it is the grammar of concession contracts.
The same grammar governs the question of regime change. How, precisely, could the United States bring about political transformation in Venezuela without incurring costs that would dwarf any plausible gains? The honest answer is that it cannot, at least not by means that resemble conventional statecraft.
Sanctions have already demonstrated their familiar pattern: collective punishment without political payoff, economic devastation without elite displacement. Covert action has yielded embarrassment rather than leverage. Military intervention remains politically toxic and strategically incoherent, promising neither swift victory nor stable aftermath.
But regime change, in this reversionary geopolitics, need not take the form of occupation. It can proceed through attrition, isolation, and the slow erosion of capacity. It can be imagined as a long prelude rather than a decisive act. Above all, it can be deferred indefinitely while remaining ideologically functional.
The arrest of Maduro does not initiate regime change; it narrates it, keeping alive the fiction of imminent resolution, while postponing the moment when the bill comes due.
This helps explain why Greenland keeps intruding upon the discussion like an absurd footnote that refuses to stay buried. On its face, the idea of attacking—or purchasing—Greenland sounds like parody, a joke that wandered too far from its writer. Yet the underlying logic is identical.
Greenland is not interesting because of its people or its politics, but because of its position within an emerging extractive geography: rare-earth minerals essential to renewable technologies, shipping lanes opened by melting ice, and geographic value in a rapidly militarising Arctic.
Here, the irony deepens. The transition to green energy, so often framed as an escape from extractive imperialism, reproduces its own material dependencies. Wind turbines and electric vehicles require minerals that are unevenly distributed and geopolitically contested.
As carbon capital accelerates extraction to avoid obsolescence, green capital accelerates capture to secure its own supply chains. The result is not a post-imperial world but a multi-track imperialism, in which old and new energy regimes overlap, compete, and collide.
Greenland thus represents the frontier of this future collision, a space where climate catastrophe, resource extraction, and geopolitical competition converge. Any American move there would be wrapped in the language of partnership, security, and infrastructure, but the substance would remain familiar.
Denmark would be treated as an inconvenience; Greenlandic self-determination would be acknowledged ceremonially and subordinated materially. The legal rationales would be improvised, the strategic benefits exaggerated, the moral costs externalised.
What further complicates this picture—and sharpens its urgency—is that the transition to renewable energy functions less as a smooth substitution than as a looming discontinuity. Markets, after all, do not respond only to present conditions but to anticipated futures.
The mere possibility that fossil fuels may become structurally less central—whether through regulation, technological breakthrough, or political rupture—alters behaviour long before any actual transition takes place. For owners of carbon-based assets, this anticipation operates not as a moral injunction but as a balance-sheet imperative. Oil in the ground is valuable only so long as there is confidence that it will be burned.
The result is a paradoxical dynamic. The more seriously the transition to renewable energy is discussed, the stronger the incentive to intensify fossil fuel extraction becomes.
Although climate summits, green industrial policy, and net-zero pledges are intended to constrain carbon capitalism, they may instead accelerate it. Faced with the prospect of stranded assets, firms and states alike rush to convert underground reserves into above-ground capital while they still can.
The future threat of decarbonisation thus produces a present surge in carbonisation, the final harvest of a resource regime that knows its days are numbered but refuses to go quietly.
Historically, this pattern is not unprecedented. Moments of anticipated technological or economic displacement have often generated frantic overproduction rather than orderly transition. As coal began to lose ground to oil, coal production spiked. As colonial empires sensed their political legitimacy eroding, they intensified extraction rather than retreating.
The logic is not one of adaptation but of liquidation. What cannot be secured for the future must be monetised immediately.
This is particularly acute for heavy crude, tar sands, and other carbon resources that require substantial upfront investment and long amortisation periods. These are not fuels that can be phased out gradually; they are all-or-nothing propositions.
Once capital is sunk, the pressure to extract becomes relentless. Any disruption—political, legal, or environmental—threatens not only future profits but the solvency of entire corporate and state structures. Under such conditions, geopolitical risk becomes a tolerable cost, even a useful instrument, if it facilitates access or weakens competitors.
Venezuela sits squarely within this logic. Its oil reserves are not simply abundant, but temporally vulnerable. If global demand shifts decisively toward renewables or if regulatory regimes tighten significantly, much of Venezuela’s petroleum wealth risks becoming economically inert.
For external actors, this creates an incentive to secure access now, under conditions of legal ambiguity and political volatility, rather than later, when the resource may no longer justify the effort. For internal elites, this creates pressure to extract and monetise regardless of social cost. The result is not a pause for transition but a race against it.
This dynamic of acceleration also explains why energy geopolitics has begun to resemble the late imperial scramble rather than the managed globalisation of the late twentieth century.
Markets alone cannot guarantee access to time-bound resources. Contracts can be renegotiated; governments can fall; regulations can change. In such an environment, control becomes preferable to exchange, and coercion more reliable than cooperation.
The old imperial calculus reasserts itself because it appears, in the short term, rational.
The irony is that this rush to extract may ultimately undermine the very transition it anticipates. By flooding markets with cheap fossil fuels, carbon capital can delay the economic viability of renewable alternatives, slowing adoption while deepening climate damage.
Yet this delay only sharpens the eventual discontinuity, ensuring that the final transition, when it comes, will be more abrupt and destabilising. The system oscillates between denial and acceleration, incapable of planning its own obsolescence.
Seen in this light, the illegal arrest of Maduro is not merely a legal farce or a political distraction. It is a signal flare from a system entering its endgame, where legality yields to urgency and extraction outruns governance.
The same logic that drives the scramble for Venezuelan oil animates the coveting of Greenland’s minerals and shipping lanes. Both are expressions of a world in which the future is feared rather than planned for, and in which the response to that fear is not restraint but naked aggression.
If this is imperialism, it is imperialism without confidence—an empire racing against the clock, aware that the ground beneath it is shifting but determined to extract a final measure of advantage before it does.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved
